Vista and Your Games

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Windows Vista Beta 2 is a landmark. While it's too early for us to say with confidence that you can use it all day for your normal tasks, Beta 2 is solid enough for us to report on this important question: How well will your games run on this new OS?

To find out if Vista's got game, we set up the 32-bit version of Vista Beta 2 on a high-end gaming test rig using a 2.8-GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 chip, an nVidia nForce 590 SLI chipset, 2 gigabytes of mem­ory, an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX graphics card, a Creative sound card, and a 160GB Seagate hard drive. ATI released new drivers on the Web to coincide with Beta 2, and nVidia did the same with platform drivers, so we used the latest and greatest.

The good news is that most of the games we ran worked well. Not everything was rosy, however. Here are some of the details:

Splinter Cell Chaos TheoryThe latest stealth action thriller from Ubisoft doesn't work in Vista, but it's probably not any fault of the application itself; it's the StarForce copy protection. StarForce installs a low-level (ring 0) driver to access your optical drive; this driver hasn't been certified for Vista. So, when you reboot after installing, which Splinter Cell Chaos Theory asks you to do, Vista informs you that it won't load the driver because of "compatibility problems." The 32-bit version of Vista will allow unsigned kernel-level drivers if installed from an account with admin privileges, as ours was. At the time of our research, we were unable to find any sort of workaround or Vista-ready driver on the StarForce site, and we have yet to test the special driver that StarForce subsequently put up.

Steam/Half-Life 2We didn't have any problems at all running the Steam platform, downloading games, or playing Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, or Counter ­Strike: Source.

Battlefield 2 We ran Battlefield 2 in both its native unpatched state and with the latest 1.3 patch; both seemed to work just fine. But one significant gotcha crept up several times in our testing: PunkBuster. The PunkBuster anti­cheating code is a common part of many online games (particularly shooters), and it works by scanning game files to make sure they're not compromised. Most Battlefield 2 servers have PunkBuster enabled: When we joined one, we were promptly kicked out of the game with a message indicating PunkBuster had failed owing to "inadequate OS privileges."

The solution, however, is simple enough: Right-click the BF2 icon, choose Properties, and then in the Compatibility tab check the box that reads "Run this program as an administrator." After doing this we encountered no problems joining any server.

F.E.A.R. It's well known that F.E.A.R. is a real system hog. Sure, it's one of the most technologically impressive action games yet released, but to enjoy it with all the bells and whistles you need a hefty PC with lots of RAM and a beefy video card. It just so happens that's what we used. Still, performance was a bit of an issue. Some driver work or OS optimization clearly needs to be done here.

Rise of Legends Instal­lation runs smoothly, but when you launch the game you get a warning that your sound card drivers are out of date, and therefore the hardware-accelerated audio will be disabled. The game still sounds great without hardware-accelerated audio. We'll chalk this up under the heading "Creative needs better Vista drivers."

Grand Theft Auto Here's a curious one: GTA ran perfectly and even showed up in the Games Explorer. That's the curious part. We were running Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ("AO" Version), one of the original releases of the game that could be modified with the controversial "Hot Coffee" mod that caused the ESRB to change the game's rating retroactively to Adults Only. But the actual rating still showed up as Mature. Otherwise, the game is good to go on Vista.

Prognosis Good but Needs Work Among other games we tested, Guild Wars, Oblivion, and The Sims 2 ran perfectly. Overall, we're happy with the state of gaming on Vista, but it isn't perfect. Yet.

Jason was a certified computer geek at an early age, playing with his family's Apple II when he was still barely able to write. It didn't take long for him to start playing with the hardware, adding in 80-column cards and additional RAM as his family moved up through Apple II+, IIe, IIgs, and eventually the Macintosh. He was sucked into Intel based side of the PC world by his friend's 8088 (at the time, the height of sophisticated technology), and this kicked off a...
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